


build a bridge to the stars

by jediseagull



Category: The Course of Honour - Avoliot (Original Work)
Genre: Exquisite Nerdery About Math, M/M, Past Abuse (mentioned)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 18:57:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17048750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jediseagull/pseuds/jediseagull
Summary: Afterwards, Jainan gets invited to give a talk on regolith extraction.





	build a bridge to the stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alpheratz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpheratz/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, alpheratz! I hope you enjoy this fic and your holiday season :D

Jainan was too clever for his own good. It was a fact of the universe, an immutable truth: nuclear fusion kept the stars burning, the scattering of light particles colored the sky blue, and Jainan was too clever for his own good - or that of anyone around him.

Ressid had found this endlessly irritating when they were children. There were some insults that simply could not be tolerated, and - as the whole family discovered, loudly and at great length - finding your little brother making corrections to your algebra homework was one of them.

At the time, Jainan hadn’t understood why she’d been upset. With numbers, the divisions between truth and falsehood were comforting in their certainty. There was no shifting their fundamental properties, no nuance that relied upon tone and mood and happenstance to understand. Math simply _was_ , and while Jainan was not the sort of boy who always needed to be right, he was also quietly, stubbornly determined not to be _wrong_.

In retrospect, he was lucky she had only shoved him out a first-floor window.

It had stopped him at home (at least where Ressid might catch him). His teachers, being neither willing nor able to employ her methods, had been less effective in reining him in. But then, right around the time that his school principal was delicately suggesting that his parents ought to consider placing him a more advanced program where he wouldn’t drive half the staff to tears with his “improvements” to their lesson plans, Jainan’s school had gone on a field trip to the capitol. They had chartered a shuttle to accommodate the number of children, and so when the third grade class of Oma Primary arrived at the capitol, they landed not at the hotel where they were staying, but at the central spaceport.

After that, whether her little brother was peeking at her homework was the least of Ressid’s concerns. Jainan liked lots of things - books and quarterstaff and the mairal cookies made from a recipe their great-grandmother had programmed into the dispenser herself. But he _loved_ the great hulking cargo ships he’d seen at the port, the engines that lifted them with improbable grace and carried them across galaxies. Their flight was not in defiance of physics, but a dance with it, mass and acceleration moving against gravity in predetermined counterpoint. For the first time in his life, Jainan looked to the stars, and he wanted to learn _everything_.

By ten, he was dismantling hoversleds in the garage he’d claimed as his workshop. By fifteen, he was enrolled in classes at Bita Point University, where, Ressid had told him, it was somebody else’s problem when he inevitably blew himself up. He’d started taking graduate classes in deep space engineering before his eighteenth birthday, and he’d found his way to studying regolith extraction within the year. It was not easy work. For the first time in his life, math had felt like an adversary instead of a companion; there’d been times when he’d wanted to throw his thesis abacus against the wall instead of grappling with one more calculation. But every time he stepped away from an unsolved problem, he found himself drawn back within the hour, unable to settle until he’d cracked it open and brought it to order. Jainan had celebrated turning twenty-one with the defense of his doctoral thesis, and if he had missed out on some of the small joys of his youth as a result, he hadn’t regretted it. He was researching, publishing, an expert in his field, and - engaged.

At twenty-two and newly married, he had sometimes wondered whether the Clan Council might have chosen someone else to bind the treaty if he had been less clever. If he had not studied regolith extraction. If he had not been seen as an asset to Taam’s work.

At twenty-seven, Jainan had no longer felt clever. He’d felt slow and cold and useless, and still he could not help but think that Taam might have despised him less if Jainan had not been - but that was over now. Things were supposed to be different. Things _were_ different.

Except -

Jainan stared at the message blinking on his wristband screen and felt an old familiar lurch in his gut.

“Hey, so I know Bel checked the packing list but I still have that weird feeling that we’re forgetting - Jainan?”

He looked up. “I told my old advisor that I was coming back to Thea.”

“Do we need to flag him for Bel?” Kiem asked immediately. In the aftermath of the interview being published, Jainan had received so many messages that his wristband had hardly been able to function under the deluge. He’d finally sat down with Bel and worked out which of the messages could be filtered through her, which he wanted to deal with directly, and which ought to be deleted upon arrival. In spite of Kiem’s initial discomfort with the idea of anyone monitoring Jainan’s communications, it was a system that seemed to work for all of them. Besides, Jainan had pointed out, once someone helped break you out of a secret military prison, telling them they couldn’t read your dinner invitations felt a little petty.

“No,” Jainan said. He liked Professor Varini, eccentric as the man was, but he also liked Bel, who had minimal tolerance for eccentricity on the best of days. No need to inflict them on each other. “But he must have heard about the regolith project. He wants me to give a lecture at the university.”

Kiem lit up, coming all the way into the study to drape himself over Jainan’s shoulder. “That’s fantastic! Or - not?” he added, catching sight of Jainan’s face.

“It’s -” Words failed him, and he shook his head, frustrated. “I enjoy teaching,” he started again.

“You do spend an alarming amount of your free time letting Gairad swing a quarterstaff at your head,” Kiem agreed. “But?”

He didn’t know how to explain the way his breath caught at the idea of standing up in front of a whole crowd of people. He wasn’t afraid of what those people would do to him, what they would say about him, when it couldn’t possibly be worse than what he had already survived. It was nothing so straightforward.

And It sounded arrogant to say that he was afraid of what _he_ would do to _them_. For all of his supposed brilliance, he had not ever been able to make Taam like him. Instead, he had made Taam feel stupid - and like Ressid, and Jainan’s teachers, the university classmates who had mocked him to his face and the nobility who had whispered behind his back, Taam had lashed out. What had scared him most about Taam’s anger was not the violence. It was the poisonous thought that he had deserved it, all of it.

 _That_ was what he was afraid of.

He shook his head again. It wasn’t true, and he knew that. But.

But.

But Taam was dead, wasn’t he, and Jainan had already decided that he was tired of being afraid. “I’m going to tell him I will. Whether or not it’s going to be any good, however -”

Kiem’s arms tightened around him, no longer even pretending that he was doing anything other than hugging Jainan as though his life depended on it. “It’s a sixteen day flight to Thea,” Kiem said. “You have two weeks to practice, and if we land and you decide you don’t want to give the lecture, I’m sure Bel can engineer a crisis big enough to get us out of it.”

From the main room, Bel called, “Only because I like Jainan best!”

Jainan felt a smile tug at his lips, and Kiem sighed, put-upon and clearly exaggerated, and said, “I can’t blame her. I like you best, too.”

 

* * *

 

Their rooms on the interplanetary shuttle were not as generously sized as their quarters in the Imperial palace, but there were some benefits to traveling as part of the diplomatic corps. The private office attached to the master bedroom was probably meant to be Kiem’s, seeing as he was the one who was technically the cultural attaché. But Kiem worked best when he could apply all that dazzling charm face to face, and as Jainan settled in at the desk to begin drafting his lecture, he knew that it was unlikely he’d see his husband until lunch. If anyone could network while traveling through deep space, it was Kiem.

But no matter how long Jainan stared at the screen he was meant to be writing on, it stayed blank. He didn’t even have the excuse of being rusty. With Gairad and her labmates’ help, he and Professor Audel had completely overhauled regolith mining in the Thean sector. There were still areas to improve upon, of course, but Jainan had been eating, sleeping, and breathing this project for months. Nobody knew it better than he did.

The knock on the door surprised him, and he fumbled his screen away. “Bel?”

“Nope,” Kiem said, poking his head through the doorway. “Thought I’d see about lunch, since it’s already ten minutes past noon, shiptime. I sent her off to start without us. You know how she is about missing appetizers. How’s the writing been going?”

“Miserably,” Jainan confessed. Kiem made a face in sympathy.

“What are you supposed to be lecturing on? I won’t get it, but that basically makes me the perfect sounding board because I’m not smart enough to say anything back.” He winced at Jainan’s sharp frown. “I mean. I’m not in possession of the right skill set? And that in no way is a reflection of my underlying intelligence.”

“You don’t have to quote me at myself,” Jainan said, letting his wristband go dark as he stood up. “But just so you know, I don’t like anyone calling my husband stupid.”

Kiem grinned and kissed him. “Can’t say I’ve ever had that problem myself, not that I’m complaining. So? What’s this lecture on, other than regolith mining?”

“That’s the problem. It can be on anything I want. Whatever I think would be interesting.” It was easier to resist the urge to run his fingers through his hair in irritation when Kiem’s hand was there, warm and waiting to be held. Jainan took it, and they started walking towards the dining room on their floor.

“Then,” Kiem said, “maybe you should start with what _you_ think is interesting. What do you like about regoliths?”

“What do you like about talking to people?” Jainan shot back.

“I like that everyone’s different,” Kiem said, entirely unruffled and wholly sincere. “I like that when you make an effort to like someone, they usually wind up liking you back. I like that sometimes all it takes to help is listening to them.”

Jainan blinked at him. “Well, anything I say after that is going to sound trite.”

“Hey, now, I don’t like anyone calling my husband trite,” Kiem teased. “Come on, why regoliths? I’ve gotta say, I’m curious, especially after Ressid told me about your love affair with shuttle drives.”

“I suppose,” Jainan said, and huffed a breath that was not quite a sigh. “I suppose I like the challenge of it. Flight is beautiful, but imagine looking up at the stars and seeing them as the universe does - atoms cycling through composition and decomposition over billions of years. And then imagine pulling the building blocks of civilization from what most people discount as so much dead rock, because you can see what it was, and what it could be. Imagine that with a handful of formulae, you can make that possible.”

“Jainan?” Kiem said.

“Yes?”

“Start with that.”

 

* * *

 

The talk was being held in the largest lecture hall on Bita Point’s campus. They had arrived two hours early, and had somehow managed to avoid the sudden influx of local journalists with an interest in furthering their education in mechanical engineering.

“You know that as soon as I go out there we’re going to end up on the newslogs again.” Kiem sighed and stopped trying to peek through the fogged glass enclosing the hall. “Attending a talk on deep space engineering. My mother will wonder if I’ve been drugged. _Bel_ will wonder if I’ve been drugged.”

“Bel did the drugging,” Jainan said. “I bribed her with the promise of buying her a Thean-made quarterstaff after we’re done, because if you were not sedated on the walk over you’d have somehow wrangled introductions to everyone who runs any kind of administrative committee and we’d be having tea with Dean Charrek right now.”

Kiem contemplated this for a moment, visibly accepted it as fact, and shrugged. “Fair. Was it that sort with the electric buttons on each end? Do I need to be worried about getting zapped every time I don’t read my messages from the press office?”

“Maybe.”

“That means yes. Ugh. Why don’t _you_ ever get passive-aggressive messages from the press office?” Kiem said.

“Because I read the briefings?”

“Because they’re worried you’re going to do something heroic again and make them look like a bunch of uninformed, unprepared idiots in front of the Emperor,” Kiem corrected, grinning. “And speaking of which, I should find my seat.”

“You don’t actually have to stay, you know,” Jainan said. “There are beautiful gardens on the other side of the building, near the biology department.”

“And waste all of your and Bel’s hard work?” Kiem was still grinning, but there was something cheerfully uncompromising in his face.

Jainan squeezed his hand once in gratitude, kissed him, and let him go.

“Good luck,” Kiem said, and vanished.

The lights dimmed. The chatter of the crowd dropped into a soft murmur, and then quieted entirely.

Jainan took a deep breath and walked onto the floor. “Good afternoon, and thank you all for being here today,” he said. “I'm Dr. Jainan nav Adessari. Although it says on your programs that I’m here to talk to you about regolith mining, what I’d really like to do is talk to you about belief. For years, the practical realities of deep-space engineering have been limited by an adherence to what has been done before, because anything else was seen as impossible. I would like to spend our time together this afternoon focusing on what could be, if we stopped telling ourselves not to believe in that impossibility.”

He clicked a button on his wristband, and the lecture hall was filled with the image of the new mining rig prototype, one Jainan had worked on for months. Even as a hologram it gleamed in reflected solar light, thin struts branching across the surface of an asteroid like a constellation. In the first row of the audience, Kiem leaned forward. The hologram fell across his face, illuminating the curve of his cheekbones, the tilt of his encouraging smile.

Jainan was, perhaps, too clever for his own good. But he looked at Kiem, a supernova glowing in his heart, and believed in the impossible.


End file.
